A server system usually includes components including a server, an operating system (“OS”) installed on the server, a middleware deployed on the server, and an application installed in the middleware and providing a service. During an operation of the server system, an incident can occur due to various reasons. Accordingly a ticket describing the incident is generated manually by, for example, an administrator of the system or automatically by the server system. The ticket describes a symptom of the incident and a component having the symptom, and also indicates an application associated with the ticket.
Conventionally, in order to locate and remove a cause resulting in the incident associated with the current ticket, all tickets associated with the application indicated by the current ticket are searched by using the symptom and/or a name of the component as keywords to find a ticket relevant to the current ticket, so that a solution for the relevant ticket can be checked to see whether it can be used for the current ticket. However, this method often obtains a large number of tickets, which requires much time to analyze them, and moreover, the obtained tickets are often found to be actually not relevant to the current ticket and thus useless for the current ticket. On the other hand, at many times it can be found that tickets associated with other applications than the current application are helpful in root cause analysis for the incident associated with the current application.